Traditional broadcast media (i.e., content bound for television or radio and delivered to its audience over channels such as terrestrial radio, satellite, coax or fiber-optic cable) is delivered within the context of a schedule (e.g., radio programming schedule, television broadcast schedule). By convention, each content item (e.g., television episode, movie, radio program) is scheduled to fit within a time slot that begins and ends on either the top or the bottom of the hour (e.g. 10:00 or 10:30). By conforming to this convention, broadcasters (i.e., companies that transmit or delivery broadcast media) can attract viewers in one time slot who were watching content from another broadcaster in another time slot.
Following the broadcast schedule convention allows viewers of broadcast content to experience tremendous amounts of fluidity in the way that their content is consumed. For instance, a viewer can consume content from multiple broadcasters in the same day. By conforming to this convention, the number of scheduling conflicts can be reduced to a discrete number of “time slots”. Furthermore, by having multiple well defined time-slots, a broadcaster has the ability to deliver a very broad menu of content to all potential viewers.
Contrary to the existence of these time slots, the individual units of artistic expression (i.e., broadcast content) are sometimes produced in blocks larger than the time slots available for broadcast. Furthermore, many broadcasters require that broadcast content to be shortened into even smaller blocks (e.g., 22 minutes for a ½ hour slot and 44 minutes for an hour slot) so that interstitial advertisements (i.e., commercials) can be inserted into the content and make its delivery commercially viable for a broadcaster. Such discrepancy between the original runtime of the broadcast content and the time available in the broadcast schedule generally results in elements of the broadcast content being trimmed for delivery over the broadcast medium.
In order to overcome the limitations of the traditional broadcast schedule, creators of broadcast content often make additional content available to the broadcast audience by uploading additional media assets to a website or by republishing the additional media assets via alternate means (e.g., selling the show on a DVD or through an Internet media outlet). This approach requires the audience to perform additional, manual actions (e.g., go to a website, sign up for an account on an Internet media outlet, download files, buy a copy of the media asset that has been packaged for commercial sale) which is only performed by audiences for a percentage of the time. This approach is further limited because audiences often cannot perform the actions to get the additional media assets until a later time (e.g., when they are at a computer or at a store). This barrier to immediacy also reduces the percentage of the audience that finally gains access to the additional content.
With the broad availability of home media devices that can store broadcast content for later playback (e.g., VCRs, DVRs, home media centers, etc), audiences now have a way to consume broadcast outside of a pre-defined broadcast schedule. This allows the broadcast audience to begin the consumption of broadcast content at a time that is different than the time it was originally scheduled to be broadcast (e.g., by recording a TV show on one day and playing it on another, recording a movie that is playing in the afternoon while the viewer works so that it can be played when the viewer returns home in the evening, or scheduling a series of recordings to be played back when the audience member returns from vacation). Many of these home media devices offer other functions that allow the broadcast audience to fast-forward, replay or pause the broadcast content. Such functions allow the broadcast audience to cause the runtime of the runtime content to be modified from its original scheduled runtime. The result of such technologies allow audiences to no longer be constrained to the broadcast schedules while still having the ability to consume the broadcast content.
Even with the availability of home media devices, broadcast content continues to be delivered within the context of a broadcast schedule. This means that even though home media devices are available for storing content for consumption outside of a predefined schedule, that the content that is consumed remains in the format of a predefined schedule.
Additionally, a savvy Internet user may be able to find some content that is scheduled by their home media device to record but which is presented in another context (e.g., on a website, as part of a subscription service) at an earlier time or day than would be available to them through the use of their broadcast provider alone. In these cases, users should not be constrained to a broadcast schedule that unnecessarily delays delivery of content that they have selected.
Thus, what is needed in the art are systems and methods for empowering creators of broadcast content and broadcasters to deliver additional content to broadcast audiences who use home media devices. This delivery of additional content must be done in a way that removes barriers such as manual processing or lack of immediacy for the broadcast audience.